reduce carbon!

so i just had an extremely nerdy revelation: all this talk of "reducing carbon" is, well, accurate.

we want to reduce carbon. as in, the opposite of oxidizing it.

now, i don't know how many of you remember high school chemistry and the concept of REDOX, but i'll try to make it simple. When we're talking about carbon (which cycles throughout the atmosphere, from plants photosynthesizing CO2 into sugars and other organisms breaking it back down), oxidation is the process that animals do (breaking it apart from other atoms and attaching it to oxygen), and reduction is the process that plants do. Anything that takes energy from carbon-based materials, be them hydrocarbons such as those found in gasoline, or simple sugars or even proteins that animals eat, is oxidizing the carbon. It's outputting CO2. Processes which remove CO2 from the atmosphere (which, last time I checked, all the environmentalists were advocating) are reducing carbon.

So Al Gore is right when he says that we need to reduce carbon. We need to reduce more carbon than we're reducing right now, that's for sure.